EARLIER FEATURES
FEATURES CONTENTS
LATER FEATURES
|
|
|
|
| 29th February 2004 | GOOGLE MYSTERIES |
Brian Grainger |
|
The most important item for using the web, to a researcher like me, is the search engine. Google has now arrived as the search engine of choice for all types of users and it is beginning to expand its facilities. This article will, perhaps, enlighten you to what Google is up to and the extra facilities hidden within it. Since I have started using the web I have used two search engines in the main. The first I have forgotten! Since I found Google I quickly realised this was the one for me. When I first started using it other people were using things like Ask Jeeves and search engines provided by their ISP. I encouraged people to try Google and slowly it got more and more references in the papers and magazines. It has now become the premier search engine. The key to a good search engine is producing valid entries to you queries. After a little thought in constructing your query, (see here for tips), Google consistently produces excellent results. It is a closely guarded secret as to how it does it exactly, but it is now well known that in the early days the concept of PageRank was key. This ranked pages by the number of links to them from other sites. The more links there were, the higher up the list the page appeared. This method has been developed to counter people who deliberately got their pages higher up the list by creating false links. Another problem has occurred with the onset of Blogs which refer to each other. In certain instances this causes lots of Google links to self referencing pages. 'The Register' moans about this all the time and generally has a demeaning tone towards Google. However, in real use by me, it has never been a problem. Google is number one. We all like our tools to come free of charge and the search engine is no exception. However, something has to pay for what we are 'given' and this is usually advertising. I think I can safely say that Google is the one and only site where the adverts are unobtrusive, yet useful. They do not hog bandwidth and they relate to what you are searching for. I have actually bought something owing to some ads. As I do not like spending money, that is a considerable achievement! Google is now so popular that there is talk of making it a public company and selling shares in it. I know this gives rewards to the original inventors but I always get worried when this happens. When shareholders have to be satisfied, rather than aspirations, the service inevitably gets worse. Nevertheless, Google is still in private hands at the moment and is still creating new ideas. I am going to concentrate on one that may have escaped your notice and tell you where to look for information about the others. For a company that creates a great search engine it is amazing that it is quite difficult to find out about things on its own site! Did you know that you can use Google as a calculator? Neither did I till I read it elsewhere. When I found out I tried searching on the Google web site for it. I eventually found it when I hit the Service and Tools link from the front page and then the Features link. You will then find Calculator from which it is easy to find the final link to complete instructions on how to use the Google Calculator! While I was trying to find Calculator I thought about the Site Map facility of some web sites, (not ICPUG because I consider the front page does that). Does Google have a site map? Yes, but there is no link from the front page! That is also on the Service and Tools page. When you get to Site Map there is no mention of Calculator so I found a dead end there. What is so great about this Calculator then? Well, it can be handy for those with an always on Internet connection to do simple arithmetic, when required. What got me interested though was the more unusual things you can do. There are in-built conversion routines so you can say 'half a cup in teaspoons'. In a similar vein you can convert numbers into Roman Numerals and vice versa. Calculator seemed to cope with the usual mathematical expressions and the examples shown on the Google page included the use of imaginary numbers. I thought I would test it out, first by adding a couple of imaginary numbers and then multiplying them. Both came up with correct answers. OK, I thought, lets try something really interesting - find the square root of an imaginary number. This seemed to be no problem to Google, even though I might find it difficult. This Calculator was pretty good.
A practical example of its usefulness, coincidentally, came at work this week. My colleague wanted to find the mass of the earth. I am not sure why but as we deal with spacecraft there must be a good reason. He decided to use Google to search for earth mass expecting to find some pages which would give him the value he needed. He did get lots of links but, right at the top of the page, Google had used the Calculator to report the exact value of the mass of the earth. This was the first time my colleague had heard of the Google Calculator.
What other features of Google are hidden away that you never knew about. Well, how about changing your Internet Explorer browser so the search button automatically calls Google rather than the Microsoft search facility. How about searching the news groups. If you prefer the interface in another language then choose one. Klingon is interesting! US users have lots more helpful features such as telephone number searches, flight information, street map information, company share information - all from Google. No need to keep a list of other web sites - it is all in one place. Hopefully, this will extend to other non-US countries one day. Have a look at the following pages to see what Google has to offer:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
